New Senior School Counsellors

It is my pleasure to introduce to the Meriden Community our new School Counsellors in the Senior School, Mrs Sarah Srikanthan and Miss Sarah Wackett. Our School Counselling team provides vital support for students as we seek to care for the girls’ social and emotional wellbeing at School.

School Counsellors provide support in the following ways:

• Assisting students to build resilience and develop problem-solving skills
• Navigating conflict and developing conflict-resolution skills
• Providing strategies to manage anxiety and low mood in the school setting
• Consulting with and being a resource to parents, caregivers and staff who are supporting students navigating challenges
• Referring to and liaising with external support organisations, psychologists, psychiatrists and other services where appropriate

If you think your daughter would benefit from a check-in with a School Counsellor, please do not hesitate to contact her Year Coordinator to organise a referral to the Counselling team. Your daughter can also self-refer to the School Counsellors by emailing counselling@meriden.nsw.edu.au

There are also a number of resources provided by our School Counsellors on the Counselling eVe page.

Book Recommendation

In a time when we hear so much about a “youth mental health crisis,” it can be challenging to identify the natural ups and downs of emotions for adolescence.

In her new book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist, disagrees with the idea that adolescence is a time of great frailty. Instead, she provides helpful insights into how we can help young people to navigate their complex emotions and use them as a powerful force in their decision-making and identity formation.

Here is a quote from Damour’s book below:

“For teenagers, powerful emotions are a feature, not a bug. This has always been true but these days it seems to be less widely understood. The past decade in particular has been marked by a dramatic shift in how we talk about feelings in general, and in particular, about the intense emotions that characterise adolescence. To put it bluntly, somewhere along the way we became afraid of being unhappy.”